Thursday, October 7, 2010

Reflections on What It Means to Trust (in) God

For some time during my undergraduate years, I struggled enormously with the popular and oft-repeated notion of "trust in God." A professor and mentor preferred this phrase to "faith" or "belief" in God, as the former carried so much baggage and the latter implied mere intellectual assent; and of course in the ordinary discourse of many Christians, one is counseled continuously to "trust God" or "trust in God."

The phrase troubled me because I had no substantive content to supply its meaning. In its poorest and most unthoughtful use -- if also its most well-worn -- people mean by it to trust, in seemingly insurmountable situations, that God will do something. But this is clearly meaningless, for God does not always "do" something in response to our problems, and even when we might affirm the case, it is just as likely not to be in our favor or assumed well-being as to be what we hoped for.

Nor can it mean to trust that all will work out well. At best that is an eschatological statement, at worst -- and more usually -- it is a bourgeois projection of a benign cosmos, an in fact heretical reification of the way things are as the best of all possible worlds. But things do not always work out well: loved ones die, the cancer spreads, the interview fails, the attempted reconciliation backfires.

So what is trust? What does it mean to trust God, to place one's own or a community's trust in God?

It means to trust that God will be God. To trust God is to believe that he is who he says he is, that he will do what he has said he will do, that he will be faithful to his promises. To trust God means that, in what feels like life's perpetually tilting scale of bad news, we continue to believe that God rules, that the evidence to the contrary is not in fact evidence to the contrary, and that our destinies reside with him -- for better or for worse. Trust in God is the explicit, lifelong unclenching of our fists around our lives' contingencies, failures, risks, and possibilities. When we trust God, we say that we are not God, that whatever happens God will be God and we will be his creatures -- and that our only hope, come what may, is in him.

Sickness, rejection, tragedy, accidents, mistakes, failures, and death will all have their say, and often nearly overwhelmingly so. Trust in God is simply -- though it is worlds away from simple or easy -- the resolute conviction, and consequent practice, that in the face of all these contradictions, God will triumph over all of them. And if God is who he says he is, his victory is both trustworthy, and our own victory, too.

4 comments:

Thanks for a great reflection on this. Two things I would want to add:

1. Trusting God means obeying God, being faithful to him, trusting that his way of life truly is abundant life.

2. Trusting in God as revealed through Jesus Christ and by the Spirit means NOT trusting in other gods.

3. You basically said this already, but I wanted to reiterate it: trusting God in any circumstance has an eschatological dimension to it. When I say "I trust God" in a hospital room, it doesn't mean I trust that God will heal me, but it means that one day, "all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well."

"And we know that for those who love God, that is, for those who are called according to his purpose, all things are working together for good." We look for evidence of things unseen, and we acquire the substance of things hoped for. God IS working all things together for good, even if we cannot scientifically see that in all moments of our life journey. God can be trusted to make life what it is supposed to be and he can be trusted to respond, if we will let Him.

I like this post, but I worry that it doesn't too take into account the everyday promises of God that His will is life to its full and that He is indeed working all things (albeit bad) for good and that he cares about every one of our sorrows and our moments of joy.

Mi Yodea?

Mi yodea? is the question the King of Nineveh asks in Jonah 3:9: "Who knows?" Jonah announces the impending destruction of Nineveh, but the King calls his people to repentance, resting his hope on the open possibility that God may be moved to mercy and forgiveness. And, as it happens, God is.

So that is the overarching question for us as we practice theology: Who knows? Who knows what God is doing, or what God has in store? The God revealed in Israel and in Jesus of Nazareth is a God of surprises, one who is doing a new thing. Such a God we will find at work in the most unlikely of places; may we, then, be fellow explorers and sojourners on the way.

About Me

I teach theology at Abilene Christian University. I'm interested in Scripture, theological interpretation, ecclesiology, the Trinity, and nonviolence. In an alternate universe I am a film critic while sidelining as an NBA analyst. Put those together, you've got this blog. Follow me on Twitter @eastbrad.